Continuing more with the thought experiments, since I find your answers (as well as your confidence in them) surprising. I have a sense that you believe that the responses to these questions are obvious, and if that is true, I would be interested in whether you can generate an explanation that makes them obvious to me as well.
Let’s imagine the inverse scenario in which you travel in a spaceship away from earth to a new planet far away and you never expect to come back. The new planet has a million elephants on it, old earth has only 1000 thousand elephants left on it. Imagine the alternative scenario in which you never leave earth and stay with the 1000 elephants, and also never expect to leave for any other planet. Would you pay the same amount to save the 1000 elephants on earth in either case?
To make this concrete, the two compared scenarios are:
1. You are on earth, there are a million elephants on a far away planet you never expect to see, and you are offered a trade to save the last 1000 animals on earth
2. You are on a distant planet with a million elephants on it, far away earth’s last 1000 elephants are about to die and you are offered a trade to save them
If so, how is this different from the scenario in which there are a million elephants in a bunker you will never visit? Also, does this mean that your moral evaluation of the same group of animals changes as you travel in a spaceship from one planet to another?
(Also, in considering these, try to control for as much of the secondary benefits of elephants as possible. I.e. maybe imagine that you are the last human and try to account for the potential technological, hedonic and cultural benefits of having elephants around)
Continuing more with the thought experiments, since I find your answers (as well as your confidence in them) surprising. I have a sense that you believe that the responses to these questions are obvious, and if that is true, I would be interested in whether you can generate an explanation that makes them obvious to me as well.
Let’s imagine the inverse scenario in which you travel in a spaceship away from earth to a new planet far away and you never expect to come back. The new planet has a million elephants on it, old earth has only 1000 thousand elephants left on it. Imagine the alternative scenario in which you never leave earth and stay with the 1000 elephants, and also never expect to leave for any other planet. Would you pay the same amount to save the 1000 elephants on earth in either case?
To make this concrete, the two compared scenarios are:
1. You are on earth, there are a million elephants on a far away planet you never expect to see, and you are offered a trade to save the last 1000 animals on earth
2. You are on a distant planet with a million elephants on it, far away earth’s last 1000 elephants are about to die and you are offered a trade to save them
If so, how is this different from the scenario in which there are a million elephants in a bunker you will never visit? Also, does this mean that your moral evaluation of the same group of animals changes as you travel in a spaceship from one planet to another?
(Also, in considering these, try to control for as much of the secondary benefits of elephants as possible. I.e. maybe imagine that you are the last human and try to account for the potential technological, hedonic and cultural benefits of having elephants around)